Imagine a consulting firm that had a monopoly on all the architects in California. The only architects in CA are ones that you might bring in from this firm, and to prevent change, it's in the contract that you can't hire outside architects. It's a straight up anticompetitive monopoly. But that doesn't mean consulting firms are bad, it's just that monopolies are bad.
The biggest difference between this kind of consulting firm and a union is the accounting and the taxes, so I think the same logic applies. Unions can be good, but monopolistic unions are bad. When there's only one police union for your city, they have extreme bargaining power because it's a monopoly.
There needs to be a middle ground between completely independent bargaining and monopolistic collective bargaining. If we figured out a reasonable way to have multiple coexisting unions for a given profession and location, I'd bet unions would be much much more widely accepted as good.
Until this bigger problem is fixed unions will remain one of the very few things workers can do to improve their odds in life. So you can't be for or against them - it is the only logical outcome of the current social order.
You seem to have the entire thing backwards: the failure to build and grow unions in the US has resulted an absence of power and political representation for working people. Without this counterbalance, the rich and corporations have used the state to enshrine benefits for themselves and total power over workers.
If there's one thing that my decade of internet commenting experience has taught me, it's that some people will always find a way to be dogmatically for or against any conceivable position.
I've actually experienced it twice, but neither case had anything to do with unions.
One was officially a Health and safety matter (if you'd not been on the manually handling course you should not be moving heave expensive bits of equipment around) though I suspect it was really more of an insurance matter (only the relevant people should be moving the expensive equipment, or accidental damages won't be covered). Commercial arse-shielding, no unions involved.
The other was again commercial: in an outsourced IT arrangement where all equipment moves had to be done by someone on the outsourced team. This of course carried a charge for time, but if it wasn't done that way the contract said the charge could still be made with additional charges for the extra paperwork. Again, a purely commercial matter, no unions present affecting the matter in either company.
For reference I volunteered at a convention there, which is how I know all this.
But I suspect it happens less often due to union matters than the oft regaled stories suggest, possibly less overall too.
The union wounds here are entirely self-inflicted by proving in practice that they make a bad system. That is terrible evangelism and no ammount of wagon circling will change that. Can you blame them for thinking a 401k would be preferrable to a pension from people who would embezzle it anyway?
They are harming the protection and good through their own short-sighted rent seeking actions. Which makes it all the more frustrating as there is actual good that could be done instead.
It is in no way limited to unions and may be found across all walks of life and individual to megaconglomerate scale but I have noticed an antipattern of "insistent loserdom", in blaming everyone else and refusing an iota of self change in a certain downward trajectory.
I personally come from a pretty poor upbringing. I can see why it's scary for some to change something that 1. is working relatively well and 2. got them out of poverty.
The point in bringing up trivial issues like moving monitors is to emphasize the greed and absurdity that ensure that even simple, quick tasks become cash sinks and long term blockers, directly because of common union practices. This is the inefficiency that unions tend to breed, and it is a direct consequence of their purpose: protect members even at the expense of nonmembers and the rest of the corporate collective.
No one is complaining that they aren't allowed to move their own monitors. We are explaining that these ubiquitous policies in sum do more harm than good to greater modern society.
When it comes to identity politics, unless you are an illiterate, congenitally disabled, imprisoned, transgender veteran of color in a 3rd world country then I would ask you to respectfully step back and let our true heroes speak. Thanks
I don't like it because it's an all-purpose "shut up" card itself. It discounts opinion and argument not because of any merit or logic, simply because of the arguer's socioeconomic situation - which is not even known! I feel it is a very lazy way to conduct a conversation.
I'm sorry if my original post came across sarcastically, i was just trying to "reductio ad absurdum" some of the arguments i've heard in the past.
What I hate about "privilege" is that it is an invitation to introduce the notion of personal virtue into what should be a dispassionate discussion. It turns into a competition which has nothing to do with the merit of the point. It is a personal thing, much like race, and it's not useful. When I hear "you wouldn't understand because you're privileged" i can just translate it to "because you're white" or "because you're asian" or "because you're X". Well great. Where does that get us? And since you're talking about me, let's look very closely at you?
I don't deny privilege exists. Of course it does. I daresay I see it more than most, living where I do. But like racism it is not to be tossed around lightly, or it will basically kill any discussion.
The whole point is that the fight for protection of workers' rights needs some sort of organization. Traditionally, that has been called a "union", but if the problem you're pointing out is that the name has too many bad connotations, feel free to propose another one.
FWIW, it looks like most of the "good unions" are careful to call themselves "guilds".
In other words, in my office an employee is not allowed to hang a whiteboard on to a wall. Because building mandates only union employees can make such hardware modifications.
Fine you are protecting the job of the union but what you are really doing is prevent job creep or scope creep.
Another hypothetical example: no employee is allowed to work past 5 pm. Sure hardworking employees want to. But when they do, the put the pressure on other employees to do the same. This kind of culture is net negative.
I think that should really read "Fine you are trying to prevent scope creep but what you are really doing is protecting the union jobs."
I've had my own experience of being forced to wait for a union worker to report onsite to accomplish a basic thing, only to be told when he showed up an hour after requested "If I didn't use the time in the job order, they'd just reduce the time alloted for the next one, and we'd get docked for running over."
Pick a metric and it will restructure the entire working environment to meet that metric, no matter how illogical or inefficient things become.
Keep adding more rules to close the loopholes in the process and you get the craziness in some jobs where things can't get done because there's no way through the red tape anymore.
It is also about territory control. You don't want to give up power to someone else. Typical society problems. The solution lies in how do you practice friendship with someone so cunning and selfish that you can be in the loosing seat quickly, yet still be friends and still be on neutral ground?
Rules and structure created by the union.
Dystopian world ahead of us
And you hear about this all the time in other workplaces. Not allowed to move a monitor to the next desk over because the union guy has to be the one to do it. Not allowed to move a piece of equipment out of the way until the union guy finishes his lunch break and does it.
Unions can be good but unions like this are so bad for everyone around them that it cancels out any good.